I highly doubt that users will get as much of a real Internet connection with these new free wifi services as they do with home DSL or cable service. Modern broadband service in the USA provides you with an Internet routable IP address that you can run server applications on any port of. The power of broadband has allowed p2p to prosper among average users, and has let any slashdotter in their parent's basement host their own SSH, FTP, HTTP, IRC, and etc, servers.
Unfortunately...most users wouldn't care if they couldn't do this anymore. If they can get free wifi that goes through NAT to get to the Internet, they'll use it, and the market for real Internet connections will disappear. Ubiquitous free wifi would be great for a centralized content provider like google, but would effectively destroy the market for cheap symmetric* Internet connections. The "power user" market will be too small to keep DSL companies in business. Small businesses and individuals will have to outsource their hosting to giant colo facilities even if they have the hardware and know how to run their own servers. This could potentially be a real threat to democracy on the Internet.
Most users want the net to be more like television: a multimedia service that turns individuals into passive media consumers and that only allows corporations to be content producers. The new Internet will provide consumers with more services then TV does. However, without any cheap and easy decentralized distribution method, the set of service providers will be restricted to those who can afford high bandwidth connections. This could be a great loss of potential information and services for consumers, and moreover would be a restriction of freedom for those who wish to be content providers.
Wireless networking could lead to the further decentralization of the Internet. Cooperative or personal wifi projects are helping us move in that direction. A centralized service like google wifi would mean going backwards.
*Data will still be able to travel in both directions of course, but other Internet users would not be able to initiate connections with the free wifi hosts, thus forcing the wifi users to only run clients, not servers.
Tadpole even makes a dual processor UltraSPARC laptop, the bullfrog. It's quite a beast. You can order it with up to 16GB RAM. I got a quote on a fully decked out bullfrog:
List Price $46,933
Discount ($3,248)
Your Discounted Price $43,685 ....An x86 machine is more economically realistic, but if you can find some way to cheaply get an UltraSPARC based notebook, you should definitely go for it.
You will never produce an efficient and secure IT system with the financial and political problems it looks like you're stuck with. However, you have the opportunity to make a real difference to a lot of young people. Hopefully the district has some students who's natural intelligence and curiosity hasn't been beaten out of them by the school system. You should be able to make friends with them by giving them freedom. Let them use the net uncensored. Let them boot Linux, Solaris, or BSD based live CDs. Let them bring laptops in and play doom3 over the LAN. If the faculty insists on using cleartext based authentication methods for networked services, teach the students how to sniff! Stay after school to help kids build a cluster from old hardware. Better yet....go dumpster diving with your students to help them find cool old hardware. Experimentation and free exchange of information allow anyone to learn just about anything faster then they can in a top down classroom setting.
You are working for the people! Your job is not to serve some moronic bureaucrat or tenure complacent teacher; your job is to provide useful services for the students. Set up a mail system that is only accessible by sshing to the mail server and running pine or mutt. If the faculty are too stupid to figure it out, then they can do without email. If the server room leaks, request renovation to your one up. If they don't fix things, petition the school board. If things still don't get fixed, re-locate the servers to the gym...athletics are so well funded in most districts, you can be pretty sure that the gym's roof won't leak. Make life a little different for everyone. Don't be afraid of conflict. Students are forced to endure the monotony of school, at least give them a chance to have some fun and real education before you get fired. "Just doing your job" will result in students growing up to be obedient conformist Microserfs like so many of today's workforce. You can set them free!
If you can afford ARP poisoning a few of your switches, etherape looks really cool and can instantly give you a better quantitative look at traffic then any graphical network monitor tool I've seen.
Although there certainly are penetration methods that use web sites, I would guess that many other application layer IP services are being used for these attacks. The media's use of the term web site to mean any IP device is deceiving.
"it can be mathematically proved that it is correct (does what it is supposed to do and nothing more or else)"
How does the RTOS actually know what it is supposed to do? I would think that some actual application code that runs on it would define what the system does. If the this Operating System lets you run Turing-complete code, won't it run into the halting problem when trying to find out if that code does something correct or not? I don't think you can mathematically predict what any computer system will do if it is allows you to some basic things, like run real programs!
Residential and commercial access appear to be slowly but steadily improving. Despite the progress that the US has made, the future looks somewhat mixed.
I'm worried about College and University connections. Usage limits and even outright censorship are the norm on High School networks. I'd like to change this, but for now, it's just a fact of life. University networks, on the other hand, have been the most unrestricted and fast ways of getting online since the birth of the Internet. My old High School class is starting college right now, and I've talked to a few friends about their school's network access. The bandwidth is usually good, but a lot of connections are filtered, firewalled, or otherwise limited. All of them so far have been behind an IP masquerading device. End-to-end connectivity has been a core principle of the Internet, supported, for example, by the Internet Architecture Board. NAT is a detriment to the Public Internet. Is your school even providing "Internet" service if hosts on the Internet cannot initiate TCP connections with you? Asemetric data rates and private IP addresses could make the Internet just another TV network, a medium where passive users consume content that only big rich corporations can provide. Hopefully the demand for p2p will keep upload rates up, and more users will become technically competent enough to host other services. Let's keep the Internet democratic and egalitarian!
Bush NEVER said that Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks on 9-11-01. However, a majority of the American people were convinced that some link existed between the Iraqi government and those who committed the 911 attacks.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename= article&node=&contentId=A32862-2003Sep5¬Found=t rue/
The grandparent poster never blamed Bush for this fact. Maybe there's something wrong with the American media or education system that has made people so ignorant. Perhaps the fact that we are one of the most religious industrialized nations means more of us are willing to have faith in blatant falsehoods. Regardless of the forces that shape public opinion, I think it's safe to say that the US military and executive branch would not have attacked Iraq if the American public was strongly against such an attack. Our support, through public opinion poles, election of right wing leaders, willingness to work in the defense industry, willingness to pay taxes, unwillingness to protest, etc, has directly lead to this war. Modern states do not go to war because of some arbitrary dictum from their commander in chief, they go to war due to a complex set of forces that cause the commander and chief to make decisions that he knows the public will support. We do not live in an authoritarian dictatorship. Most leftists view those in power as the sinners who are manipulating the people, and the masses as the sheep who are blindly following the leaders. I see the media, the politicians, the religious leaders, and all of those in power as the result of social forces just as much as "the people" are. Hardly anyone makes rational decisions! We're all just getting swept on and away by the invisible hand of history. We (the voters, the students, the congressmen and women, the solderers, the teachers, everyone!) need to stop and think and evaluate what exactly are the implications of our choices on our fellow human beings. We should be conservative in action, making sure to first do no harm before doing anything at all. We should be scientific in thought, meaning willing to accept any idea as possible, but subjecting every idea to scepticism and rational scrutiny. As the world grows more interdependent, humans must either become smarter, or live in fear of terror attacks they are unwilling to understand.
Our war in Iraq is "defensive"?.... Tell me when the Iraqi military attacked the USA! This is a war of US aggression.
I won't physically harm anyone of any religion, but I will tell anyone that their ideas are idiotic. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in something in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
I did not get to vote for Bush or Kerry or Nader or Cobb or anyone else. I was under 18. If you really believe our electoral system is democratic, good for you. It's a stretch, but you might be able to defend that position. I'll give you democracy. But is representative democracy the best system of government? On August 19, 1934, 95% of the Germans who were registered to vote went to the polls and 90% (38 million) of adult German citizens voted to give Adolf Hitler complete and total authority to rule Germany as he saw fit. Only 4.25 million Germans voted against this transfer of power to a totalitarian regime. (No use invoking Godwin's law on/.)
Don't we have a duty to resist what the majority wants, if what they want is unethical? Even if we can't get every American to protest, stop working for the military, and stop paying income taxes, if we get enough to do some of those things, we can stop this war.
The US military has WMDs that can destroy civilization itself, and our leadership consists of religious fundamentalists. You have to think hard before you consider DIRECTLY supporting an institution that is that dangerous. The Internet has personal and economic benefits that outweigh it's risks. It is a largely decentralized medium that allows for a high degree of personal freedom among users. There is little useful comparison between that actions of browsing the web, and working for a company that makes bombs.
I do not buy movies or music from businesses that are members of the MPAA and RIAA. They are dicks. Independent movies and music are in my opinion often more intellectually and artistically interesting. I avoid commercial TV as well, but occasionally watch it to try and understand the cultural influences at play among my peers. TV is the best primary source for studding the corporate media. The best secondary source is the work of Noam Chomsky IMHO. Games do not make kids shoot each other. A complex confluence of factors in a kid's upbringing can cause them to act violently. Basically shitty parents, war, or religious extremism are the best ways to make a young person violent, not playing doom. I'm not a huge gamer, but occasionally enjoy playing FPS games with my younger brother. This is perfectly ethical.
The primary use of a clock, is to inform a human of the time, not to kill people. I am not advocating destroying everything that can be used for violence. Why do you think I am a primitivist? I love technology, but I am also not an idiot. I know that if my nation is the most powerful and aggressive country in the world, we will make enemies. These enemies will want to fucking kill me. Even if you have no moral problem with the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians that you help kill, you have to realize that the kids who saw mom or dad's head get blown off will be driven to kill by a rage that no round of Quake could incite. Even if these Iraqi kids don't grow up to be suicide bombers, you can bet they will donate money to Hammas, Islamic Jihad, Al Quada, or some other extremist group. Just as 9-11 made Americans support aggression against civilians, a terror attack on Iraq will make Iraqis support aggression against us.
Fuck the Amish and all other religious extremists.
You don't get it, do you.....the posting was from someone who worked for a defense contractor. Their product is directly sold to the military. Saying that the product could be dual use is no excuse. Regardless of the economic and social benefits of a given technology, it is not ethical to sell that technology to terrorists. Every innovation may aid the military, but you don't need to be the one to give that technology to the military. Your thinking is totally flawed. It's as if I said that one should not make uniforms for solderers, and you thought I was against clothing for everyone else. I am not saying that this person should not innovate, just that they should not sell their time and bodies to a corporation or private company that then gives the resulting products to the greatest killing force on earth. George Bush and Cheney, and the rest of the administration are simply men, not gods. They cannot wage war alone. It is through the support of taxes, and millions of working people that they continue to murder. We are the ones who can and must act.
Consider quitting your job. Take a serious look at what the military that your industry supports is doing to people all over the world. This post may be flame bait, but as an American, I think we all need to take a look at the ethical implications of our economic actions.
Is wireless ethernet and Linux (but not debian) good enough for you? If so...you can get the ARM based zipit for about $99. It has a normal stereo headphone jack, and what looks like an audio remote jack on it. You have to hack it a bit to actually get it to play mp3's and such, but the manufacture claims it will support streaming audio in the next firmware release.
Re:Ever wonder..?
on
How Ice Melts
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Other planets are more stable (climate wise) then earth, but their normal temperatures are probably too extreme to sustain life.
Venus' orbital eccentricity: 0.00677323 Neptune's 0.00858587 Earth's: 0.01671022
Venus' surface temperature ranges from about 820 degrees to nearly 900 degrees F
Earth's surface temperature ranges from about -80 degrees to around 130 degrees F
Neptune's mean cloud temperature ranges from -315 to -307 degrees F (Temperature varies vastly by cloud elevation, but probably little across the same cloud level)
I donno....google seams pretty reliable. Akamai web caching is designed to ensure online reliability (and is Linux based). The standard for Internet based systems that need long uptime and robustness is GNU/Linux. This is because the web as a popular medium is only about a decade old. The only reason why other organizations (banks and the military for example) that need reliable systems have not migrated to Linux is because they use legacy code that would be expensive to port.
The particular solution the CIO in the article choose gambled with reliability because they used 144 separate servers in 12 clusters. Well implemented clusters of x86 hardware can run seamlessly, but individual machines are likely to fail. Redundancy should mean that a couple blown power supplies or corrupted disks a year is no big deal, but it's still a slight risk and a pain to fix. There are Linux solutions that run on larger machines. They could have replaced their four IBM mainframes with four Linux mainframes. IBM supports Linux on the zSeries mainframes (formerly called System/390, before that System/370, which was the successor to System/360..its about as traditional a mainframe as you can still buy). The top high end computers are Linux based. The top 3 most powerful computers in the world at this time, two IBM eServers and a Sgi Altix, all run Linux. Linux offers the most flexible, powerful, and reliable solutions out there.
Linux beats Unix on cost
Really?... The cost of the operating system itself is free in the Unix (BSD) world, as the Linux world. Propritary Unix may have some liscencing cost, but hardware and support are bigger price factors.
Moving desktops to linux might be considdered revolutionary, but this isn't. The big iron market of servers and HPC machines has really been dominated by linux for several years now.
bash.org
and then i said that the deadline for the oxford coding competition was valentines day, they were like, "do you geeks have weird alternative holidays for every thing?"
We are capable of absolutely transforming environments. The place you lie, sit, or stand reading this was probably altogether different a hundred years ago, not to mention two thousand years ago; and almost all of those changes were brought about by human beings. We have completely remade our world in the past few centuries, changing life for almost every kind of plant and animal, ourselves most of all. It only remains for us to experiment with executing (or, for that matter, not executing) these changes intentionally, in accordance with our needs and desires, rather than at the mercy of irrational, inhuman forces like competition, superstition, and routine.
Once we realize this, we can claim a new destiny for ourselves, both individually and collectively. No longer will we be buffeted about by powers that seem beyond our control; instead, in this exploration of ourselves through the creation of new environments, we will learn all that we can be. This path will take us out of the world as we know it, far beyond the farthest horizons we can see from here. We will become artists of the grandest kind, painting with desire as a medium, deliberately creating and recreating ourselves--becoming, ourselves, our own greatest work.
To accomplish this, we'll need to learn how to coexist and collaborate successfully: to see just how interconnected all our lives are, and finally learn to live with that in mind. Until this becomes possible, each of us will not only be denied the vast potential of her fellows, but her own potential as well; for we all make together the world that each of us must live in and be made by. The other thing that is lacking is the knowledge of our own desires. Desire is a slippery thing, amoebic and difficult to pin down, let alone keep up with. If we're going to make a destiny out of the pursuit and transformation of desire, we first must find ways to discover and release our loves and lusts. For this, not enough experience and adventure could ever suffice. So the makers of this new world must be more generous and more greedy than any who have come before: more generous with each other, and more greedy for life!
Slashdot Mirror
I highly doubt that users will get as much of a real Internet connection with these new free wifi services as they do with home DSL or cable service. Modern broadband service in the USA provides you with an Internet routable IP address that you can run server applications on any port of. The power of broadband has allowed p2p to prosper among average users, and has let any slashdotter in their parent's basement host their own SSH, FTP, HTTP, IRC, and etc, servers.
Unfortunately...most users wouldn't care if they couldn't do this anymore. If they can get free wifi that goes through NAT to get to the Internet, they'll use it, and the market for real Internet connections will disappear. Ubiquitous free wifi would be great for a centralized content provider like google, but would effectively destroy the market for cheap symmetric* Internet connections. The "power user" market will be too small to keep DSL companies in business. Small businesses and individuals will have to outsource their hosting to giant colo facilities even if they have the hardware and know how to run their own servers. This could potentially be a real threat to democracy on the Internet.
Most users want the net to be more like television: a multimedia service that turns individuals into passive media consumers and that only allows corporations to be content producers. The new Internet will provide consumers with more services then TV does. However, without any cheap and easy decentralized distribution method, the set of service providers will be restricted to those who can afford high bandwidth connections. This could be a great loss of potential information and services for consumers, and moreover would be a restriction of freedom for those who wish to be content providers.
Wireless networking could lead to the further decentralization of the Internet. Cooperative or personal wifi projects are helping us move in that direction. A centralized service like google wifi would mean going backwards.
*Data will still be able to travel in both directions of course, but other Internet users would not be able to initiate connections with the free wifi hosts, thus forcing the wifi users to only run clients, not servers.
If you want to know more about how chinese censorship works and how people are getting around it, check out some of these mp3s:e at-firewall.mp3
c -hacktivism-1.mp3
c -hacktivism-2.mp3
http://the1.no-ip.com/~the1/spoken%20word/hope_gr
http://the1.no-ip.com/~the1/spoken%20word/hope_cd
http://the1.no-ip.com/~the1/spoken%20word/hope_cd
Hasn't similar technology been available for years? Like this:x /products/c/957266.html
http://www.sgi.com/products/appsdirectory.dir/iri
http://www.rugged-systems.co.uk/pdf/V2%20Unix%20La ptop%20-%20RSL.PDF
Tadpole even makes a dual processor UltraSPARC laptop, the bullfrog. It's quite a beast. You can order it with up to 16GB RAM. I got a quote on a fully decked out bullfrog:
....An x86 machine is more economically realistic, but if you can find some way to cheaply get an UltraSPARC based notebook, you should definitely go for it.
List Price $46,933
Discount ($3,248)
Your Discounted Price $43,685
You will never produce an efficient and secure IT system with the financial and political problems it looks like you're stuck with. However, you have the opportunity to make a real difference to a lot of young people. Hopefully the district has some students who's natural intelligence and curiosity hasn't been beaten out of them by the school system. You should be able to make friends with them by giving them freedom. Let them use the net uncensored. Let them boot Linux, Solaris, or BSD based live CDs. Let them bring laptops in and play doom3 over the LAN. If the faculty insists on using cleartext based authentication methods for networked services, teach the students how to sniff! Stay after school to help kids build a cluster from old hardware. Better yet....go dumpster diving with your students to help them find cool old hardware. Experimentation and free exchange of information allow anyone to learn just about anything faster then they can in a top down classroom setting.
You are working for the people! Your job is not to serve some moronic bureaucrat or tenure complacent teacher; your job is to provide useful services for the students. Set up a mail system that is only accessible by sshing to the mail server and running pine or mutt. If the faculty are too stupid to figure it out, then they can do without email. If the server room leaks, request renovation to your one up. If they don't fix things, petition the school board. If things still don't get fixed, re-locate the servers to the gym...athletics are so well funded in most districts, you can be pretty sure that the gym's roof won't leak. Make life a little different for everyone. Don't be afraid of conflict. Students are forced to endure the monotony of school, at least give them a chance to have some fun and real education before you get fired. "Just doing your job" will result in students growing up to be obedient conformist Microserfs like so many of today's workforce. You can set them free!
http://info.biosci.ohio-state.edu/network/etherape .png
http://etherape.sourceforge.net/images/v0.3.1.png
Although there certainly are penetration methods that use web sites, I would guess that many other application layer IP services are being used for these attacks. The media's use of the term web site to mean any IP device is deceiving.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mdma
"it can be mathematically proved that it is correct (does what it is supposed to do and nothing more or else)"
How does the RTOS actually know what it is supposed to do? I would think that some actual application code that runs on it would define what the system does.
If the this Operating System lets you run Turing-complete code, won't it run into the halting problem when trying to find out if that code does something correct or not? I don't think you can mathematically predict what any computer system will do if it is allows you to some basic things, like run real programs!
See
http://www.jerkcity.com/
http://www.sexylosers.com/
Residential and commercial access appear to be slowly but steadily improving. Despite the progress that the US has made, the future looks somewhat mixed.
I'm worried about College and University connections. Usage limits and even outright censorship are the norm on High School networks. I'd like to change this, but for now, it's just a fact of life. University networks, on the other hand, have been the most unrestricted and fast ways of getting online since the birth of the Internet. My old High School class is starting college right now, and I've talked to a few friends about their school's network access. The bandwidth is usually good, but a lot of connections are filtered, firewalled, or otherwise limited. All of them so far have been behind an IP masquerading device. End-to-end connectivity has been a core principle of the Internet, supported, for example, by the Internet Architecture Board. NAT is a detriment to the Public Internet. Is your school even providing "Internet" service if hosts on the Internet cannot initiate TCP connections with you? Asemetric data rates and private IP addresses could make the Internet just another TV network, a medium where passive users consume content that only big rich corporations can provide. Hopefully the demand for p2p will keep upload rates up, and more users will become technically competent enough to host other services. Let's keep the Internet democratic and egalitarian!
Check out the Asus WL-HDD. It runs Linux and you can upload different firmware's for additional features (ssh or NFS access for example).
m it=Go&DEPA=0&type=&description=asus+wl-hdd&Categor y=0&minPrice=&maxPrice=&Go.x=0&Go.y=0
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.asp?Sub
You will need to hook it up to an car inverter (12VDC to 120VAC), since it is NOT battery powered.
Bush NEVER said that Iraq was behind the terrorist attacks on 9-11-01. However, a majority of the American people were convinced that some link existed between the Iraqi government and those who committed the 911 attacks.= article&node=&contentId=A32862-2003Sep5¬Found=t rue/
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn?pagename
The grandparent poster never blamed Bush for this fact. Maybe there's something wrong with the American media or education system that has made people so ignorant. Perhaps the fact that we are one of the most religious industrialized nations means more of us are willing to have faith in blatant falsehoods. Regardless of the forces that shape public opinion, I think it's safe to say that the US military and executive branch would not have attacked Iraq if the American public was strongly against such an attack. Our support, through public opinion poles, election of right wing leaders, willingness to work in the defense industry, willingness to pay taxes, unwillingness to protest, etc, has directly lead to this war. Modern states do not go to war because of some arbitrary dictum from their commander in chief, they go to war due to a complex set of forces that cause the commander and chief to make decisions that he knows the public will support. We do not live in an authoritarian dictatorship. Most leftists view those in power as the sinners who are manipulating the people, and the masses as the sheep who are blindly following the leaders. I see the media, the politicians, the religious leaders, and all of those in power as the result of social forces just as much as "the people" are. Hardly anyone makes rational decisions! We're all just getting swept on and away by the invisible hand of history. We (the voters, the students, the congressmen and women, the solderers, the teachers, everyone!) need to stop and think and evaluate what exactly are the implications of our choices on our fellow human beings. We should be conservative in action, making sure to first do no harm before doing anything at all. We should be scientific in thought, meaning willing to accept any idea as possible, but subjecting every idea to scepticism and rational scrutiny. As the world grows more interdependent, humans must either become smarter, or live in fear of terror attacks they are unwilling to understand.
Our war in Iraq is "defensive"?.... Tell me when the Iraqi military attacked the USA! This is a war of US aggression.
/.)
I won't physically harm anyone of any religion, but I will tell anyone that their ideas are idiotic. Faith is the great cop-out, the great excuse to evade the need to think and evaluate evidence. Faith is belief in something in spite of, even perhaps because of, the lack of evidence.
I did not get to vote for Bush or Kerry or Nader or Cobb or anyone else. I was under 18. If you really believe our electoral system is democratic, good for you. It's a stretch, but you might be able to defend that position. I'll give you democracy. But is representative democracy the best system of government? On August 19, 1934, 95% of the Germans who were registered to vote went to the polls and 90% (38 million) of adult German citizens voted to give Adolf Hitler complete and total authority to rule Germany as he saw fit. Only 4.25 million Germans voted against this transfer of power to a totalitarian regime. (No use invoking Godwin's law on
Don't we have a duty to resist what the majority wants, if what they want is unethical? Even if we can't get every American to protest, stop working for the military, and stop paying income taxes, if we get enough to do some of those things, we can stop this war.
The US military has WMDs that can destroy civilization itself, and our leadership consists of religious fundamentalists. You have to think hard before you consider DIRECTLY supporting an institution that is that dangerous. The Internet has personal and economic benefits that outweigh it's risks. It is a largely decentralized medium that allows for a high degree of personal freedom among users. There is little useful comparison between that actions of browsing the web, and working for a company that makes bombs.
I do not buy movies or music from businesses that are members of the MPAA and RIAA. They are dicks. Independent movies and music are in my opinion often more intellectually and artistically interesting. I avoid commercial TV as well, but occasionally watch it to try and understand the cultural influences at play among my peers. TV is the best primary source for studding the corporate media. The best secondary source is the work of Noam Chomsky IMHO. Games do not make kids shoot each other. A complex confluence of factors in a kid's upbringing can cause them to act violently. Basically shitty parents, war, or religious extremism are the best ways to make a young person violent, not playing doom. I'm not a huge gamer, but occasionally enjoy playing FPS games with my younger brother. This is perfectly ethical.
The primary use of a clock, is to inform a human of the time, not to kill people. I am not advocating destroying everything that can be used for violence. Why do you think I am a primitivist? I love technology, but I am also not an idiot. I know that if my nation is the most powerful and aggressive country in the world, we will make enemies. These enemies will want to fucking kill me. Even if you have no moral problem with the tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians that you help kill, you have to realize that the kids who saw mom or dad's head get blown off will be driven to kill by a rage that no round of Quake could incite. Even if these Iraqi kids don't grow up to be suicide bombers, you can bet they will donate money to Hammas, Islamic Jihad, Al Quada, or some other extremist group. Just as 9-11 made Americans support aggression against civilians, a terror attack on Iraq will make Iraqis support aggression against us.
Fuck the Amish and all other religious extremists.
You don't get it, do you.....the posting was from someone who worked for a defense contractor. Their product is directly sold to the military. Saying that the product could be dual use is no excuse. Regardless of the economic and social benefits of a given technology, it is not ethical to sell that technology to terrorists. Every innovation may aid the military, but you don't need to be the one to give that technology to the military. Your thinking is totally flawed. It's as if I said that one should not make uniforms for solderers, and you thought I was against clothing for everyone else. I am not saying that this person should not innovate, just that they should not sell their time and bodies to a corporation or private company that then gives the resulting products to the greatest killing force on earth. George Bush and Cheney, and the rest of the administration are simply men, not gods. They cannot wage war alone. It is through the support of taxes, and millions of working people that they continue to murder. We are the ones who can and must act.
Consider quitting your job. Take a serious look at what the military that your industry supports is doing to people all over the world. This post may be flame bait, but as an American, I think we all need to take a look at the ethical implications of our economic actions.
Is wireless ethernet and Linux (but not debian) good enough for you? If so...you can get the ARM based zipit for about $99. It has a normal stereo headphone jack, and what looks like an audio remote jack on it. You have to hack it a bit to actually get it to play mp3's and such, but the manufacture claims it will support streaming audio in the next firmware release.
http://www.elinux.org/wiki/ZipIt
A Ti-92 is a Moterola 68k system.
Google can decide
Other planets are more stable (climate wise) then earth, but their normal temperatures are probably too extreme to sustain life.
Venus' orbital eccentricity: 0.00677323
Neptune's 0.00858587
Earth's: 0.01671022
Venus' surface temperature ranges from about 820 degrees to nearly 900 degrees F
Earth's surface temperature ranges from about -80 degrees to around 130 degrees F
Neptune's mean cloud temperature ranges from -315 to -307 degrees F (Temperature varies vastly by cloud elevation, but probably little across the same cloud level)
I donno....google seams pretty reliable. Akamai web caching is designed to ensure online reliability (and is Linux based). The standard for Internet based systems that need long uptime and robustness is GNU/Linux. This is because the web as a popular medium is only about a decade old. The only reason why other organizations (banks and the military for example) that need reliable systems have not migrated to Linux is because they use legacy code that would be expensive to port.
The particular solution the CIO in the article choose gambled with reliability because they used 144 separate servers in 12 clusters. Well implemented clusters of x86 hardware can run seamlessly, but individual machines are likely to fail. Redundancy should mean that a couple blown power supplies or corrupted disks a year is no big deal, but it's still a slight risk and a pain to fix. There are Linux solutions that run on larger machines. They could have replaced their four IBM mainframes with four Linux mainframes. IBM supports Linux on the zSeries mainframes (formerly called System/390, before that System/370, which was the successor to System/360..its about as traditional a mainframe as you can still buy). The top high end computers are Linux based. The top 3 most powerful computers in the world at this time, two IBM eServers and a Sgi Altix, all run Linux. Linux offers the most flexible, powerful, and reliable solutions out there.
Linux beats Unix on cost ... The cost of the operating system itself is free in the Unix (BSD) world, as the Linux world. Propritary Unix may have some liscencing cost, but hardware and support are bigger price factors.
Really?
Moving desktops to linux might be considdered revolutionary, but this isn't. The big iron market of servers and HPC machines has really been dominated by linux for several years now.
bash.org
and then i said that the deadline for the oxford coding competition was valentines day, they were like, "do you geeks have weird alternative holidays for every thing?"
We are capable of absolutely transforming environments. The place you lie, sit, or stand reading this was probably altogether different a hundred years ago, not to mention two thousand years ago; and almost all of those changes were brought about by human beings. We have completely remade our world in the past few centuries, changing life for almost every kind of plant and animal, ourselves most of all. It only remains for us to experiment with executing (or, for that matter, not executing) these changes intentionally, in accordance with our needs and desires, rather than at the mercy of irrational, inhuman forces like competition, superstition, and routine.
Once we realize this, we can claim a new destiny for ourselves, both individually and collectively. No longer will we be buffeted about by powers that seem beyond our control; instead, in this exploration of ourselves through the creation of new environments, we will learn all that we can be. This path will take us out of the world as we know it, far beyond the farthest horizons we can see from here. We will become artists of the grandest kind, painting with desire as a medium, deliberately creating and recreating ourselves--becoming, ourselves, our own greatest work.
To accomplish this, we'll need to learn how to coexist and collaborate successfully: to see just how interconnected all our lives are, and finally learn to live with that in mind. Until this becomes possible, each of us will not only be denied the vast potential of her fellows, but her own potential as well; for we all make together the world that each of us must live in and be made by. The other thing that is lacking is the knowledge of our own desires. Desire is a slippery thing, amoebic and difficult to pin down, let alone keep up with. If we're going to make a destiny out of the pursuit and transformation of desire, we first must find ways to discover and release our loves and lusts. For this, not enough experience and adventure could ever suffice. So the makers of this new world must be more generous and more greedy than any who have come before: more generous with each other, and more greedy for life!